Frank McGuinness's 1985 drama is
a group portrait of eight Ulster Protestants who volunteered for
the British Army at the start of the First World War.
Atmospherically revived by James Phillips, it follows the
recruits from the day of their enlisting, to the morning of their
butchering in the cold mud of no man's land near the banks of the
River Somme in France.

Although it's a play which takes
place in a military context, it's still a surprising choice of
drama to accompany a season of debates, readings and cabarets at
the Pleasance Theatre co-produced by the John Caird Theatre
Company. The season is intended to look at the politics, morality
and pity of war. McGuinness's play may be big on the pathos of
its protagonists, but it doesn't have much to say about the
business of war itself. Instead, it's more like an anthem for a
doomed cuiture -especially when seen in the context of Protestant
disaffection and unrest in Northern Ireland today.

Set in 1916, at a time when the
Catholics in the South of Ireland were fighting for independence,
the tragedy of these characters is that they are being eaten
alive by the forces of history. With orange sashes around their
necks, parade drums at their bellies and anti-Papist propaganda
poisoning their minds, these are men who live and die by
rhetoric. Just as their pride went down with the Titanic after it
was built in Belfast shipyards, so this play sees these Orange
Men as vainly fighting to preserve their ascendancy in Ireland
-as much a losing battle as was the battle of the Somme.

The fates of the men amount less
to a didactic commentary on the nature of war than to a solemn
elegy sounding the last post on Protestant traditions.

Accordingly, James Phillips's
production is as well drilied as a military funeral, giving the
play the ceremonial flavour of a proud march towards the grave. Unusually the
most outstanding feature of his production is Guy Hoare's
lighting on David Farley's spartan set. Hoare carves up the stage
giving thickness to the light with dry ice, and painting sepia
tones from foggy grey to murky white. The apotheosis of Hoare's
lighting comes in the end when these tragic Prods march to their
deaths into what else but a blood-orange sunrise.